Vote for your favourite SUV of 2014

Vote for your favourite SUV to help decide the winner of the 2014 Telegraph
Motoring Awards

The fast-expanding Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) sector is a key part of our 2014 Festival of Motoring coverage, in which you can vote for your favourites in a variety of categories, as well as the overall winner.

The Festival of Motoring itself runs from May 12-16, but you can start voting now at the bottom of this page.

As for the success of the SUV, archaeologists sifting through the detritus of the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be stuck with a poser as big as the extinction of the dinosaurs. What interstellar event left our roads so impassable that we needed such vast numbers of these high-riding cars?

And how was it that such a sober company as Volkswagen suddenly proposed a range of no less than five different-sized SUVs or, in the case of VW-owned Audi, seven (the Q7 down to the Q1) so that when they are all on stream about 35 per cent of everything sold with four rings on the grille will be an SUV?

Notwithstanding those readers with farms, snow-line accommodation or vertiginous driveways, it seems difficult to justify a vehicle that is less aerodynamic, heavier, thirstier and less dynamically able on the road than a conventional saloon or estate. But even Jaguar and Bentley are proposing their own SUVs, Maserati has one in the pipeline, Porsche has two and Rolls-Royce has at least done some thinking on the subject, there's no stopping them.

You only need look at the statistics to understand the profound effect the SUV has had on our car-buying. What the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) calls "dual purpose vehicles" are now the third biggest sales segment in the UK. And those sales, measured as a sub-brand of each sector of the market, are growing fast.

Take one manufacturer's analysis of last year's UK sales, for example: the SUV B segment (think Fiat Panda 4x4, Ford Fiesta Ecosport, Nissan Juke) was up 84 per cent; the C segment (VW Tiguan, Ford Kuga) was up 27 per cent, the D segment (Land Rover Discovery, Audi Q5) was up 12.5 per cent.

Perhaps the most staggering figure of all is that while the UK luxury car segment rose by just 10 per cent, the luxury SUV segment rose by 45 per cent. As one marketing expert put it: "If you're not in it, you're standing at the front door throwing £10 notes at the competition."

Not that the agility of a mountain goat is essential in the SUV market. Argue all you like about whether Spen King, Gordon Bashford and David Bache's 1970 Range Rover or the American Motors/Renault 1970 Jeep Cherokee provided the blueprint for the supremely able on- and off-road vehicle, but neither has much to do with the modern SUV.

In fact it was the distinctly underwhelming Mercedes-Benz body-on-frame M-class, launched in 1998, that set the style, although BMW's monocoque X5 which followed in 1999 was the real standard-setter of a class that consisted mainly of a car on stilts, where all-weather rather than all-terrain performance was the baseline.

And did they clean up. With customers queuing up for luxury SUVs in China, the Middle and Far East and North America, there's been incredible amounts of money made. Marginal profits on a large expensive car are in the region of 25-30 per cent but in the case of an SUV, where you've amortised the research, development and tooling for the drivelines and underbody in the saloon and estate derivatives, its money for old rope.

In 15 years BMW has sold well over 1.3 million X5s and made more than £20 billion in profits.

Gradually the SUV grew smaller and moved into the non-premium world. No car more faithfully follows that trend than the Nissan Qashqai, the epochal non-premium SUV launched in a 2007. Designed in Paddington, engineered in Cranfield and built in Sunderland, the Qashqai was effectively a 21st century version of the 1977 Matra-Simca Rancho; a cod off-roader, tough to look at but driving the front wheels and built for the suburbs.

The Rancho sold 58,000 in eight years. Nissan wanted to sell 100,000 Qashqais each year. None of us really believed it and neither did many at Nissan. Half way through its first year on sale, someone at Nissan had to phone Sunderland and ask for more Qashqais, a lot more – it sold more than double Nissan's estimate.

"Where did it all go so right for the Qashqai?" asked one rival marketing boss. He's right. The first Qashqai took root in the top 10 bestsellers list and was replaced by an all-new version on January 20 this year. Almost incredibly, a mix of old and new models has sold so well in the first two months of 2014 that the SMMT records the Qashqai name as being the eighth best-selling vehicle in the UK, with its smaller sister, the soon-to-be-facelifted Juke, in ninth place.

So what's new in SUVs? "Small is beautiful" seems to be the watchword, with diminutive SUVs from Renault, with its strong-selling Captur, Ford with the Ecosport, Peugeot's 2008 and Volkswagen with its Golf-based Tiguan and maybe even another SUV based on the Geneva motor show T-Roc concept.

Most of these tiny SUVs drive only their front wheels, but expect to see the widespread adoption of the electrical traction enhancement system used in Fiat's Panda Trekking and Peugeot's 2008 – highly effective they are, too.

A high (or "command") driving position has traditionally been part of the appeal of the SUV, so it was surprising to find that the new Mercedes-Benz GLA has its seats hardly higher that the A-class it is based on. So will the high-riding 4x4 SUV morph circularly back into front-drive hatchbacks, as the Merc seems to imply? It seems unlikely given this year's floods and the previous year's snow storms, when a high-mounted body helped to clear the obstructions and keep going.

No, SUVs are here to stay and grow and we'd like to know which models you most admire in this important and lucrative sector. Using the SMMT figures as a base, we've produced our list of the 10 you can vote for.

Here's our top 10 list, but which do you think is best? You can vote at the bottom of the page.